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Carlo Aymonino, one of the most important architects of the second and in Compte’s philosophical neopositivism—but unless we harken
| Manuel de Solà-Morales
and was constantly interweaving the abstract values of urban life with
an appreciation for the uniquely textured event. architectural intelligence.
Aymonino’s reading of the city as an all-encompassing matrix of To him, a building only made sense as a piece of the larger urban
architectural cultures was not without scholastic precedent—it could puzzle, and as such, as the locus of some function in relation to its
be found in Muratori’s typological analyses of Venice, for instance, context. And it was, moreover, the city plan, in all the richness of its
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forms—be they cadastres, roads, streetlights or signs, overlapping or Taken as a body of work, Aymonino’s theoretical contributions are
repeating—that contained within it the qualities peculiar to the urban transcendent not merely due to his architectural designs or the power
| Manuel de Solà-Morales
Cities was the first. Then, in 1972 Gustavo Gilli published the Spanish
translation of his 1965 The Origins and Development of the Modern standing up for Rossi’s ideas was a lifelong commitment, and their
City as a real book, one of a series (Ciencia Urbanística, 11). A collaboration was a source of so many of the shades of meaning and
subsequent version of The Meaning of Cities was published in Madrid subtle differences that made that era among Italy’s—and the world’s—
in 1981 by Blume. most prolific in terms of new architectural ideas.
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After finishing at Rome’s Sapienza University, Aymonino went to of the liberal left/Christian Democrats (Benèvolo, Salzano). During
work in the studio of his uncle, the powerful Marcello Piacentini, the 1970s he was renowned for his controversial positions, and for
and soon found himself working with Quaroni and Ridolfi on the bringing debates over urbanism, planning, and the socialist city into
design for the Campus Martius district, which they proceeded to the Italian Communist Party congresses, along with other hot topics of
build between 1949 and 1954 and made into the ultimate expression the moment like the unceasing flow of capitalist development and the
of architectural “neorealism.” At the end of the 1950s, together with countervailing Soviet and Chinese models.
his brother Maurizio, Alessandro de Rossi, and the Baldo brothers, Aymonino was reliably unmerciful on such topics. Against the grain of
Aymonino started the AIDE studio. Beginning in 1974 came the virtually all his contemporaries, he maintained that the city could never
famous Gallaratese project in a mixed-use neighborhood of Milan, the escape its history and that new modes of production would necessarily
master plan for Pesaro’s historic downtown, and, from 1978 to ’81, bring about changes in the relationships between the city’s distinctive
| Manuel de Solà-Morales
In this effort to distance himself from ideological oversimplifications and
reassert the city’s materiality as both an instance and a broader definition,
Aymonino battled with the same fervor against the generalizations of Manuel de Solà-Morales
his comrades in the Communist Party (Tafuri, Campos V.) and those Artà, Mallorca, August 2010
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